I fell in love with my engagement ring at first sight. It’s a classic double-halo design with a rare round champagne diamond, brilliant-cut, at its center.
I know admitting how much I love a piece of jewelry makes me sound shallow and materialistic. Wait until I tell you that my husband didn’t actually choose the ring — I did. But him asking me to pick what I liked was a sign that he understood who I was: someone who wanted a say in the symbols of her life.
A few years later, when I realized after three failed rounds of IVF that we weren’t going to have a baby, one of the many things I mourned was that I wasn’t going to have a daughter who would inherit my cherished ring. I’m a little ashamed to confess that, inevitably, I would take that thought one, two, a million steps further, falling for the existential question: What is my legacy going to be, if not a child to carry me forward — my name, my stories, my ring — into a future I won’t get to see?
Dolly Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, wrestled with that same question, and then answered it as expansively and generously as anyone ever has.
Parton didn’t shy away from speaking publicly about why she and her husband, Carl Dean, didn’t have children. The couple was married for nearly 60 years. “Early on, when my husband and I were dating, and then when we got married, we just assumed we would have kids,” she told Billboard in 2014. “We even had names.”
Parton reportedly suffered from endometriosis in the 1980s and had a partial hysterectomy, which typically causes infertility. She was in her late 30s at the time, just as her career was reaching its dizzying peak. By then, she had outgrown country music stardom: She had written “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 — possibly in a single day; and “9 to 5,” her film debut and its famous theme song, had topped the charts, earned her an Oscar nomination, and turned her into a mainstream icon in the United States.
The singer spoke publicly about being depressed and suicidal as a result of the infertility. “It was an awful time for me when I realised there would be no babies,” she told the then-Evening Standard, a British publication, in 2012. Yet she persevered and pivoted, relying on her Christian faith to carry her through.
Here’s where Parton’s story turns remarkable. She established the Dollywood Foundation in 1988, pouring her fortune into robust philanthropic endeavors. It’s as if she had put her money where her grief was.
In the early 1990s, Parton created a literacy initiative, the Buddy Program, that provides $500 to eligible students in Sevier County, her home county in Tennessee, who graduate from high school. The dropout rate fell from 35 percent to 6 percent.
Later, in 1995, she founded the Imagination Library in honor of her father, who never learned to read. The program mails a free book per month to enrolled children from birth to age 5, regardless of income. According to the program, more than 330 million books have been gifted across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland.
She’s also donated generously to medical research, including $1 million that helped fund early research behind Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and another $1 million to fund pediatric infectious disease research. After wildfires devastated her home county in 2016, the relief fund she created and seeded raised more than $12 million, according to the Dollywood Foundation, giving about $10,000 to each family that lost its home.
It’s as if Parton took the grief of the motherhood dream she was denied and converted it into mothering at scale, in the process redefining what a legacy can look like for childless people like me, and for those who are child-free by choice. In doing so, she quietly dismantled an expectation that has been weaponized against women — and internalized by us — for centuries: that our worth and legacy is measured in descendants. It took me a while but now I get it: children aren’t one’s legacy. They’re not monuments to their parents or vessels for our ambitions or expectations.
Parton, too, once believed that having a child was her “duty as a woman.” Instead, she proved to everyone that mothering does not require childbearing. “God has a plan for everything,” she said on the Today show in 2017. “I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine. And they are now.”
If you must know, my champagne diamond will go to my stepdaughter, who loves shiny, beautiful things just as much as I do. As for honoring Parton, I’ll leave the musical tributes to the experts. I will remember her instead as the woman who helped me see what my engagement ring had symbolized all along: choosing for yourself, which Dolly did her whole life. And she answered the legacy question I once asked over my ring: No one carries you into the future. You carry yourself there, in what you give away.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.